The United Nations has declared 2009 the International Year of Astronomy (IYA), to celebrate
the 400th anniversary of Galileo turning his telescope to the heavens and changing forever humanity’s view of itself.  Events and programs will be offered throughout the U.S. and the world.

To prepare for IYA, the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) are sponsoring a weekend of workshops on how to present astronomy activities and ideas to audiences in schools, museums, nature centers, community groups, and everywhere people gather. No background in astronomy is required to participate.

The program will be held before the meeting of the AAS, which this year includes an ASP symposium on the International Year of Astronomy, in the St. Louis (Missouri) Convention Center. Each day, there will be 3 or 4 workshops to choose from, addressing different topics and audiences.

The full schedule and more information can be found here.

Registration for the workshops is only $25 per day.

Among invited to attend are:
1) K-12 teachers
2) museum, planetarium, and nature center educators
3) college astronomy instructors who do outreach
beyond their own classrooms
4) amateur astronomers actively engaged in outreach
5) NASA science program educational ambassadors.

Space for the workshops is limited to preserve the hands-on cooperative environment, and registration is open on a first-come, first-served basis only until the space is gone.

Our weapon of choice is New Media. New Media differ from traditional media (such as television, radio, and print) in their informality. Many forms of New Media start as user-provided content (that means you and I can both bring content to IYA!). New Media content-building infrastructures answer the content provider’s creative whims (want something silly – we’ll bring you silly!), and New-Media content can be commented upon (hey! Check out the Forums!), shared, borrowed, adopted, edited, and re-posted (please link to us!) by a broad audience.

Classic examples of New Media include blogs and podcasts – and we’ll be producing both. This media is typically distributed through content-specific websites and RSS feeds, which allow individual Internet users to select preferred streams of media (including text, audio, and video) to be delivered to them automatically. If you look up in your address bar, you may see a little RSS orange symbol. If you click on this, it will take you to this pages RSS Feed, and you can subscribe to this feed in popular clients like Google Reader. This way, any changes or updates we make will be brought straight to you, where you’re reading, when you want them.

So explore this site, subscribe to RSS feeds of working groups that interest you, and help us get out the world that the International Year of Astronomy is coming to the planet nearest you in 2009.